Larger cache, and only a slightly higher clock speed. Anything else of significance?

The sooner VMS moves off Itanium the better. It is a shame the Itanium was never developed further but one could say the same for Alpha

Even AMD's up and coming Naples looks like it could give the Itanium a thumping. 32 cores (64 simultaneous threads), 8 memory channel with 2TB ram support, 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes! Let's hope the rewrite of VMS can take advantage of this cpu because its about to pop out of the AMD woodshed very soon

Even the Ryzen 7 PC cpu has got 8 cores and comes in a 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) version, sure, it will not have the same I/O throughput as the Itanium but in other workloads I'm betting it will walk all over the Itanium

Are there any benchmarks that show the expected performance improvements of the new Itanium? The side by side comparison to the Paulson doesn't indicate much of an improvement at first glance

What's it got over the previous cpu's?Larger cache, and only a slightly higher clock speed. Anything else of significance?The sooner VMS moves off Itanium the better. It is a shame the Itanium was never developed further but one could say the same for AlphaEven AMD's up and coming Naples looks like it could give the Itanium a thumping. 32 cores (64 simultaneous threads), 8 memory channel with 2TB ram support, 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes! Let's hope the rewrite of VMS can take advantage of this cpu because its about to pop out of the AMD woodshed very soonhttps://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/amd-naples-server-processor-more-cores-bandwidth-memory-than-intel/Even the Ryzen 7 PC cpu has got 8 cores and comes in a 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) version, sure, it will not have the same I/O throughput as the Itanium but in other workloads I'm betting it will walk all over the ItaniumAre there any benchmarks that show the expected performance improvements of the new Itanium? The side by side comparison to the Paulson doesn't indicate much of an improvement at first glance

Understand, I'm not a fan of the itanic.

One of our customers has an i4, and routinely 500+ users. It's doing the job.

Post by abrsvcNot to burst your bubble but...Be careful just counting users. I used to easily support 45 users comfortably on a VAX 780. The I4 is much more powerful than 12 times a 780...Any comparison has to include some description of what (if anything) the users are actually doing.Dan

Sent: Thu, May 11, 2017 3:40 pmSubject: Re: [New Info-vax] Intel Itanium Processor (9700 series a.k.a. Kittson)Not to burst your bubble but...Be careful just counting users. I used to easily support 45 users comfortably on a VAX 780. The I4 is muchmore powerful than 12 times a 780...Any comparison has to include some description of what (if anything) the users are actually doing.Dan

Yep.

I had 750's with 8 DZ11s each in them (so potentially 64 users at once when the recommended load was12-16 users) and 2 DZ11's was the maximum "supported" configuration in the box - the others were on a wall.

Those users were trained to login, do a task, then logout, but still every character interrupted the CPU....

Post by David FrobleUnderstand, I'm not a fan of the itanic.One of our customers has an i4, and routinely 500+ users. It's doing the job.Now, for some, maybe not, but to me 500 users is a bit impressive.

It is. I remember when I started off as an operator on VMS, one was lucky to see 30 users on a Vax!

On our system now we typically have around 900. Around Christmas that ramped up to just over 1K. That's on a i4 with a bucket load of ram

They are interactive sessions which often spin off batch jobs to complete workloads. The batch jobs are the system killers

The i2 before it simply couldn't keep up. The i4 does the job except when locking gets excessive, mysync ramps up. One cpu is dedicated to locking and it helps. I think if we were to add another 200 odd users the system would succumb to the drastic mysync death spiral

Better inter process syncing mechanisms are needed but that's not just VMS that suffers this. I was reading a users experience with windows 10 the other day with a trail of one of the AMD recently released cpu's and they claimed all the cpu's were showing 25% usage with little workload

I wonder what issues will come out of the woodwork when we go to x86 based cpu's with their higher clock speeds. Are there any race conditions awaiting in VMS I wonder

Post by IanDThey are interactive sessions which often spin off batch jobs tocomplete workloads. The batch jobs are the system killers

There's a long history of that happening with batch jobs. Memoryusage, locking contention, etc. Priority inversions does tend todegrade interactive performance, though slogging through lock priorityproblems with priority boosts does usually avoid the deadlocks.

Post by IanDThe i2 before it simply couldn't keep up. The i4 does the job exceptwhen locking gets excessive, mysync ramps up. One cpu is dedicated tolocking and it helps. I think if we were to add another 200 odd usersthe system would succumb to the drastic mysync death spiral

Synchronization issues are why gonzo numbers of cores aren't viabledesigns for many applications, and why adding cores and sockets to aserver configuration can reduce performance. Cache-coherentmultiprocessors get slower as more cores are added, and designs such asNUMA aren't a panacea.

Post by IanDBetter inter process syncing mechanisms are needed but that's not justVMS that suffers this.

There's a decent range of those on OpenVMS, ranging from spinlocks tomessage-passing to lock management to semaphores to turd files to...Always better to have and to need less synchronization, where that'spossible. Sharding and partitioning of loads, where that's workable.Scheduling batch off on cloned read-only data where that's feasible,too. Distributed scheduling and process management are also weakareas of OpenVMS, requiring local tools or third-party tools or thefragility and complexity of scheduling via the queue manager. Havingsomething akin to libdispatch would be handy, as POSIX is a bit of aslog — though it's certainly feasible to use the existing queueprimitives to get something akin to that, less the integration andtooling.

Post by IanDI was reading a users experience with windows 10 the other day with atrail of one of the AMD recently released cpu's and they claimed allthe cpu's were showing 25% usage with little workload

Across various platforms, there are interesting discussions of whatmeasurements are taken and what particular measurements are showing,too. Whether the systems are doing useful work, or are waiting in usermode for something to happen, both can legitimately be considered useractivity, but the latter case masks what can be idle processors; wheresome other aspect of the system configuration is the constraint and notthe processor. I look at what's available to developers and end-userswith Instruments and dtrace on macOS, and no easy analogs for most ofthose tools over in OpenVMS.

Post by IanDI wonder what issues will come out of the woodwork when we go to x86based cpu's with their higher clock speeds. Are there any raceconditions awaiting in VMS I wonder

Faster processors have broken timing assumptions in VMS applicationcode since the second VAX, certainly. Or what issues around memorypage protections might arise, an area that VSI is undoubtedly exploringas part of the port. Or what other mechanisms might become availablefor coordinating activity or improving performance, for that matter.

Post by David FrobleUnderstand, I'm not a fan of the itanic.One of our customers has an i4, and routinely 500+ users. It's doing the job.Now, for some, maybe not, but to me 500 users is a bit impressive.

It is. I remember when I started off as an operator on VMS, one was lucky to see 30 users on a Vax!On our system now we typically have around 900. Around Christmas that ramped up to just over 1K. That's on a i4 with a bucket load of ramThey are interactive sessions which often spin off batch jobs to complete workloads. The batch jobs are the system killersThe i2 before it simply couldn't keep up. The i4 does the job except when locking gets excessive, mysync ramps up. One cpu is dedicated to locking and it helps. I think if we were to add another 200 odd users the system would succumb to the drastic mysync death spiralBetter inter process syncing mechanisms are needed but that's not just VMS that suffers this. I was reading a users experience with windows 10 the other day with a trail of one of the AMD recently released cpu's and they claimed all the cpu's were showing 25% usage with little workloadI wonder what issues will come out of the woodwork when we go to x86 based cpu's with their higher clock speeds. Are there any race conditions awaiting in VMS I wonder

IanD,

If locking is high, the better question is "Locking WHAT?"

In addition to speed, volume/user scale up often uncovers issues which were not a consideration in smaller/lower volume configurations.

Metrics are only part of the answer in these cases. Often, only metrics in combination with a review of the codebase will uncover the underlying nature of the problem.

Maxing out a resource (e.g., memory, CPU, locking) is only a symptom. Increasing the resources is one option, but it often can be purely palliative (e.g., aspirin will reduce a fever; it does nothing for the underlying infection). I am reminded of a client site years ago (when memory was expensive). They had horrible response time, and the vendor recommendation was an expensive memory expansion.

The problem was that they had tens of users each running a multimegabyte applications image. The system was swapping like mad. The solution was a single command, INSTALL the applications image (it was written in FORTRAN and compiled as part of the installation procedures, so I had the source). This reduced the memory requirements from megabytes/user to a few hundred kilobytes/user. Swapping was eliminated, response time went back to reasonable.

Post by David FrobleUnderstand, I'm not a fan of the itanic.One of our customers has an i4, and routinely 500+ users. It's doing the job.Now, for some, maybe not, but to me 500 users is a bit impressive.

It is. I remember when I started off as an operator on VMS, one waslucky to see 30 users on a Vax!On our system now we typically have around 900. Around Christmas thatramped up to just over 1K. That's on a i4 with a bucket load of ram

What's it got over the previous cpu's?Larger cache, and only a slightly higher clock speed. Anything else of significance?The sooner VMS moves off Itanium the better. It is a shame the Itaniumwas never developed further but one could say the same for AlphaEven AMD's up and coming Naples looks like it could give the Itanium athumping. 32 cores (64 simultaneous threads), 8 memory channel with2TB ram support, 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes! Let's hope the rewrite of VMS

can

take advantage of this cpu because its about to pop out of the AMDwoodshed very soonhttps://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/amd-naples-server-processor-more-cores-bandwidth-memory-than-intel/Even the Ryzen 7 PC cpu has got 8 cores and comes in a 3.6 GHz (4.0

GHz

Turbo) version, sure, it will not have the same I/O throughput as theItanium but in other workloads I'm betting it will walk all over the

Itanium

Are there any benchmarks that show the expected performanceimprovements of the new Itanium? The side by side comparison to thePaulson doesn't indicate much of an improvement at first glance

While everyone likes to talk about server performance, the reality isthat 75% of most applications today could likely be handled with justabout any current server HW platform today.

Certainly 75+% of most OpenVMS Customers today are likely more thanhappy with current I4/I2 systems performance.

Heck, Alpha system Customers typically are upgrading for financialsupport/license/future protection reasons, not performance.

Having stated this, the new I6 systems will be of interest to the smallnumber of Customers that do need the likely 10-20% performance increase.

The availability of I6 systems is much more of interest to performancechallenged HP-UX Customers because HP-UX really only scales up, not out.

What's it got over the previous cpu's?Larger cache, and only a slightly higher clock speed. Anything else of significance?The sooner VMS moves off Itanium the better. It is a shame the Itanium was never developed further but one could say the same for AlphaEven AMD's up and coming Naples looks like it could give the Itanium a thumping. 32 cores (64 simultaneous threads), 8 memory channel with 2TB ram support, 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes! Let's hope the rewrite of VMS can take advantage of this cpu because its about to pop out of the AMD woodshed very soonhttps://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/amd-naples-server-processor-more-cores-bandwidth-memory-than-intel/Even the Ryzen 7 PC cpu has got 8 cores and comes in a 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) version, sure, it will not have the same I/O throughput as the Itanium but in other workloads I'm betting it will walk all over the ItaniumAre there any benchmarks that show the expected performance improvements of the new Itanium? The side by side comparison to the Paulson doesn't indicate much of an improvement at first glance

Not sure I agree. Itanium2 is currently the only game in town for OpenVMS as the x86-64 flavor is not yet born. Although Alpha served us well, our DS20e (which we purchased in 2002) was showing signs of age so moving to an rx2800-i2 last year bought us some insurance. It came with three years of support (hardware and software) from HPE which means we should be good until next year when we will swing our OpenVMS support contract over to VSI. Then on to x86-64 6-12 months after VSI releases it.

Post by Neil RieckNot sure I agree. Itanium2 is currently the only game in town for OpenVMS asthe x86-64 flavor is not yet born. Although Alpha served us well, our DS20e(which we purchased in 2002) was showing signs of age so moving to anrx2800-i2 last year bought us some insurance. It came with three years ofsupport (hardware and software) from HPE which means we should be good untilnext year when we will swing our OpenVMS support contract over to VSI. Thenon to x86-64 6-12 months after VSI releases it.Neil Rieck Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/technological_change.html

Not sure what you're saying Neil? Not sure what an Itanium2 is?

Now, you've got an i2, and yes, they worked well for us. But we find the i4 tobe a bit better, nothing to get terribly excited about, but a definiteimprovement. Note, if you're talking HPE and VMS, then yes, the i2 is as far asthey went. But they are re-selling the VSI products that support the i4, andwill be able to re-sell the VSI products for the i6. I'm guessing that ifsomeone is not getting what they need, the i6 may help a bit.

Post by David FrobleNot sure what you're saying Neil? Not sure what an Itanium2 is?Now, you've got an i2, and yes, they worked well for us. But we find the i4 tobe a bit better, nothing to get terribly excited about, but a definiteimprovement. Note, if you're talking HPE and VMS, then yes, the i2 is as far asthey went. But they are re-selling the VSI products that support the i4, andwill be able to re-sell the VSI products for the i6. I'm guessing that ifsomeone is not getting what they need, the i6 may help a bit.

Sir, you are correct. If it weren't for the efforts of VSI there would be no discussions anywhere about using OpenVMS on i4 (Itanium 9500 a.k.a. Poulson). For whatever reason, HP (now HPE) ended qualification tests of OpenVMS on Poulson signalling to everyone that they were going to let OpenVMS die. It was VSI who qualified OpenVMS on Poulson and have already announced their intent to support OpenVMS on Kittson.

[[[ Personal comment: I had been leading a 7-year effort to replace our Alphas with Itaniums in our shop. During that time, my employer did not know that HP had announced their intent to not support OpenVMS on Poulson (or anything after). They also did not know that VSI stepped into to save OpenVMS from extinction in 2014. If they had gotten wind of any of this then I am certain we would have been force to move off OpenVMS and possibly off HP hardware. So next year when our OpenVMS support contract with HPE ends, I'm going to have to sell it to them as "VSI is HPE's preferred vendor of software support" ]]]

Back to my original point: Itanium2 is the only game in town until VSI releases a version of OpenVMS that will run on x86-64.

What's it got over the previous cpu's?Larger cache, and only a slightly higher clock speed. Anything else of significance?The sooner VMS moves off Itanium the better. It is a shame the Itanium was never developed further but one could say the same for AlphaEven AMD's up and coming Naples looks like it could give the Itanium a thumping. 32 cores (64 simultaneous threads),

Careful, there are some in this group who are adamant that a VMS systemwill never need more than 2, or perhaps 4 cores and 640kB of memory. Oram I mixing things up now?

Post by IanD8 memory channel with 2TB ram support, 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes! Let's hope the rewrite of VMS can take advantage of this cpu because its about to pop out of the AMD woodshed very soonhttps://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/amd-naples-server-processor-more-cores-bandwidth-memory-than-intel/Even the Ryzen 7 PC cpu has got 8 cores and comes in a 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) version, sure, it will not have the same I/O throughput as the Itanium but in other workloads I'm betting it will walk all over the ItaniumAre there any benchmarks that show the expected performance improvements of the new Itanium? The side by side comparison to the Paulson doesn't indicate much of an improvement at first glance